Chief Product and Technology Officer

Decision Lens is seeking a Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO) to lead the company's product and technology strategy and drive the next generation of decision intelligence solutions for government. As a member of the executive leadership team, the CPTO is accountable for Product, Design, and Engineering. You will define the platform roadmap, make deliberate build/buy/partner decisions, and execute. This is a hands-on leadership role — the ideal candidate will be as comfortable in architecture and code reviews as in board meetings.

Decision Lens is a private equity-backed company entering an accelerated phase of growth. Decision Lens delivers mission-critical decision intelligence software to the public sector — Department of War, civilian agencies, and state and local governments. The platform combines a proprietary decision-science engine, a portable data layer, a configurable application layer, and emerging AI-powered capabilities that help organizations make faster, more transparent, and more defensible decisions.  

Duties and Responsibilities

  • Platform & Strategy. Define the long-term product and technology roadmap across decision science, data, applications, AI and emerging technologies. Establish the architectural direction — scalability, security, modularity — and make the prioritization calls that balance innovation, customer value, and profitable growth.

  • Team & Execution. Lead and develop the Product, Design, and Engineering organization. Set high performance standards, recruit senior talent, and build a culture of ownership, rapid experimentation, and continuous delivery.

  • Market & Customers. Maintain deep fluency in customer missions across defense, civilian, and SLED markets to position the company for sustained growth and category leadership. Translate those insights into platform capabilities, not one-off applications. Serve as a visible product and technology leader with customers, partners, investors, and the Board.

  • Commercial Alignment. Partner with Sales, Customer Experience, and Finance to connect product investment to ARR growth, retention, and operational objectives. Evaluate every investment through the lens of customer impact and financial return.

  • Security & Compliance. Ensure the platform meets government requirements including FedRAMP, CMMC, IL5/IL6, and applicable DoD standards. Own platform resilience, release management, and operational risk.


Job Qualifications

Required
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Business, or related field.
  • 15+ years building and shipping software products; 5+ years leading combined product and engineering organizations at VP, SVP, or C-level.
  • Direct P&L or major product line accountability with a demonstrable track record of moving gross retention, net retention, and new ARR through product decisions.
  • Federal government fluency: PPBE, POM, UFR, MILCON, appropriation colors, year-of-money rules, FedRAMP, IL5/IL6, CMMC, DISA PA/ATO.
  • Hands-on AI stack fluency: foundation models, agent frameworks, evals, retrieval, AWS Bedrock and adjacent infrastructure, observability tooling.
  • High emotional intelligence and a collaborative leadership style, with a demonstrated track record of building trust, aligning cross-functional teams, and influencing outcomes across diverse stakeholders.
  • PE board exposure: demonstrated ability to present product strategy, architectural decisions, technical risk, and financial impact to a sophisticated investor audience — and to act on the feedback.
  • Proven track record of recruiting senior product and engineering talent against higher-paying competitors.
  • Experience operating a platform-and-modules org where teams ship independently while remaining coherent on shared platform decisions.
  • Eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.
Preferred
  • Prior CPTO, CTO, or CPO experience in a PE-backed company at comparable scale, including ownership of a board-facing product narrative.

  • Direct experience competing against Palantir in federal government deals.

  • Experience running a forward-deployed engineering or solution-consulting model and integrating it back into a core roadmap without creating an unmanaged portfolio of one-off applications.

  • Track record of building agentic systems in production, including evaluation, observability, and guardrail infrastructure.

  • Public artifacts — papers, talks, shipped products — that establish credibility with AI-first engineering candidates.


Location:  This role is based in the Washington, DC area for regular customer and stakeholder engagement. Decision Lens operates in a remote environment. Headquarters is located in Arlington, VA.

Compensation: The salary range for this position is $250,000–$300,000 per year. The range reflects that this role may be filled at varying seniority levels; actual compensation will be determined by factors including relevant experience, skills, qualifications, and internal equity. This position is also eligible for a bonus.

Company Overview
Decision Lens is an AI-driven platform for high-stakes government decisions, built to give leaders the clarity, speed, and analytical rigor that hard choices between competing priorities demand.

Behind every government budget, program, or policy tradeoff is a leader and a team accountable for the outcome, often working with incomplete information and competing pressures. That's the problem we've dedicated ourselves to solving.

Decision Lens establishes a governed decision framework that connects real-time data to the criteria and rationale behind every decision, so leaders can make better, faster tradeoffs with confidence and defend them at any point in time.

Apply: Send your resume to careers@decisionlens.com

Decision Lens Inc is an equal opportunity employer, and as such affirms the right of every person to participate in all aspects of employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, citizenship, sex, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic.

If you are interested in applying for employment and need special assistance or an accommodation to apply for a posted position, contact our Human Resources department at humanresources@decisionlens.com.